


Surrender

by MooseFeels



Series: Kicked You Around Some [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Freed Slave!Dean, Hurt/Comfort, former slavery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-18
Updated: 2014-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-29 18:22:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1008563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MooseFeels/pseuds/MooseFeels
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and Sam and Castiel, in the aftermath.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there! I'm on fall break, and I'll try to have some of this written in a meaningful way by the end of it! It'll probably be pretty slow going, though.

The tattoo artist has long red hair and pale skin and a way of holding herself that shows that she means business. She does beautiful work, though, some of the best in the state.

Dean can hear the way her nose wrinkles and forehead creases when she looks at his back and says, “I’ll need more than one session. And it’s going to hurt.”

“I can handle that,” Dean answers.

It’s been three weeks since their trip to Kansas, and Dean is so damn glad that he can sit in this chair and begin to get rid of these goddamn scars.

Castiel holds his hand, sheet pale and nervous beside him.

“I’ll be okay,” Dean says. “I’ve been through worse.”

Castiel shakes his head. “Don’t say that. Please, don’t say that.”

Between the two of them, Sam and Cas are pretty good with Dean’s life in the fields. They’re good to talk to, good to confess to. Ellen’s pretty good, too, but she’s so damn far away, and Dean hates talking on the phone. It turns out he has some inner ear damage or something, because there’s some stuff he just can’t hear. Another souvenir, one he can’t get rid of.

The needle isn’t a sharp pain like the whip or a burning pain like a brand. It’s a low, buzzing pain like hunger that he can mostly ignore but then he’ll breathe the wrong way or there will be a pause and then it’s almost unbearable.

He has to do this, though. He has to.

“We get a lot of ex-slaves in here,” the tattoo artist murmurs, almost absently. “Not a lot of boyfriends with them, though.”

Castiel nods, weakly. “I need to be here,” he says.

“You want anything?” She asks. “I could make you guys match.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Castiel answers, and Dean grins at him.

“I dunno, baby,” Dean shoots back, “could be fun.” He waggles his eyebrows furiously.

Castiel just rolls his eyes and kisses him, and it's enough (like it always is) to make the pain go away.

Just for a minute. 

 


	2. Chapter 2

Dean doesn’t take his shirt off around Castiel, Sam knows.

It’s complex. It’s equal parts the things Castiel doesn’t want to know and the things Dean doesn’t want to show him. Dean knows Castiel will ask questions. Castiel knows Dean will answer.

Castiel is such a very gentle man. It does not surprise Sam why Dean fell so desperately in love with him so quickly.

Sam’s not Castiel, though, and his catharsis- their healing is different.

A late summer storm blew through a couple of weeks ago and took up some of Ellen’s roof tiles, so he’s here with his brother to do some repairs. They’re experiencing an Indian Summer- long and dry and hot well into October. It’s a bad sign- means that the winter is going to be rough. The sun is high overhead. The air is still. The crickets sing loudly in the scorched fields that lay all around their county.

From on top of the house, the steel fences a few miles away look like thin ribbons. Like weak threads that lay against the concrete patchwork of the auction houses.

“You sure you want to help?” Sam asks for the fortieth time that day. “I can get this myself. Really. Do it all the time.”

“Sam, I swear to Christ if you don’t stop, I’m going to push you off of this roof,” Dean murmurs as he intently slats in a new shingle.

His broad back is exposed and the white scars and black ink are stark against his skin. These are whip marks, Sam knows. Sam knows what every mark on his brother’s body means. He knows the difference between tailed and multi-tailed whips and knives and puncture wounds. Sam has been taught to read his brother, and his back speaks.

Sam looks at him, working carefully and thoughtfully and turns back to his own shingles and holes that need patching and repair.

“Bad enough I get it from Cas,” Dean continues. “I don’t want to feel guilty for wanting to...con-con-con-” he pauses. Takes a deep breath. “Word that means ‘help.’ Has ‘con-’ in the beginning.”

“Contribute,” Sam supplies.

“Yeah. Contribute,” Dean finishes. His vocabulary has grown since the word-a-day calendars and the scrabble, but he still has holes and he still has trouble remembering everything. It’s amazing, though. Really. Dean’s literate now and is working on some more math skills. He’s taking the exam for emancipation in the coming weeks and soon he’ll be a free man. His own man.

“This is the one thing I can do,” he says. “I can’t drive the car or go to the grocery store or get a job or read to you or anything like that. I can fix things and build things and you know...work with my hands or whatever.”

“Dean-”

“Don’t, okay?” he interrupts. “Don’t. I’m working on being good at other things. But for now, this is how I contribute.” He sits back up a bit and looks at Sam. He squints a bit, the sun in his face. “How do I make you and Cas be okay with that?”

Sam looks at Dean for a long minute.

Sometimes, being Dean’s brother is the most natural thing in the world. It comes like laughter or breathing. Sometimes (a lot of the time, most of the time, all of the time) he can’t quite put away the baggage. He can’t quite put the distance back between them from when they were just friends and not- not brothers. The distance that meant Sam could listen to him. Listen to Dean’s stories about being whipped and beaten and working. About the cattle cars and the deadly heat.

The distance meant that Sam could divorce himself, even a little bit, from the unnatural disaster of Dean’s life.

Now it’s the disaster of both of their lives.

There, he thinks almost daily, but for the grace of God went I.

“I’m sorry we’ve had so much difficulty respecting your wishes,” Sam says. “We don’t want to somehow….we don’t want to-”

“I know,” Dean says. “I’m sorry. It’s hard for me, too. His hand is tight on the hammer, knuckles white. “And on days where I can’t handle where I was or who I was, you’re there for me. You’re both there for me. I was a slave,” he says, and Sam almost flinches at the word.

It’s a lot heavier now, that word.

“I was a slave for a long time. For...for however old you are and a little more, that’s how long that was who I was. I know. I remember. I can’t forget,” he continues. He lines the hammer up with a nail, pulling the thing back to drive it in. “And it...it puts a color on some of the things I do. And that matters. But you don’t make me do nothing I don’t want to. You don’t beat me. You listen to me, most of the time. I was a slave but that’s only a piece of what I am.” The hammer makes a flat, smacking sound against the head of the nail and the wood of the roof. The shingle stays in place. “It’s not my everything. It’s not...it’s not...it’s not my soul or my uh, my identity,” he says, finally. Smiles to himself, pleased to have found the right word on his own. “I survived the fields. And they didn’t make me helpless and they didn’t make me broke.” He looks back up at Sam and frowns. “So shut the fuck up and let me help you fix your ma’s goddamn roof,” he finishes.

The scars on Dean’s back are covered and changed by the ink, but they’re still there. The finished tattoo will not stop the things Dean’s back says, but it might change them. It will not heal them all the way through, but it will change them, and maybe that can be enough, for now.

Sam smiles at him. Looks back at his own shingle and says, “Don’t let her hear you use that language; she’ll blame me somehow and I’m pretty sure she has other chores she wants done while I’m in town.”

Dean laughs, shifts to get to the next spot that needs repair.

Sometimes, these things are easy.

 


	3. Chapter 3

Sam takes a puff of his inhaler when they get inside, and it makes something inside of Dean's chest clench.

The inhaler is small, made of blue plastic with a metal cartridge in the top. Long words with lots of parts in a language that doesn't exist anymore along the label, words Dean probably couldn't say no matter how many times he looked at them and said them one little part at a time.  Strange. Slaves who couldn't breathe, they either sent for delicate factory work or they died with lungs swollen shut.

Dean knows it's from the fire, it's not genetic, but still. One more reason to be thankful it was him and not Sam out in those fields for so long.

Sam tosses the thing back into the medicine cabinet and says, "I need to shower. Get some of this dust off of me. If I'm not out of the shower in twenty, check on me, yeah?"

Dean nods. Sam's feet tromp upstairs and Dean sits at the kitchen table with a tall, cold class of ice water.

Ice is one of Dean's favorite things about being free. Apple pie is a close second, and something Sam calls "Dad Rock" is a third.

It's three in the afternoon on a Friday, which means Castiel is working, but Dean still wants to call him up. Wants to hear his voice, just the things he says. The things he's done today. His thoughts.

Castiel might still own him, technically, legally, on paper, but he makes Dean feel like he never had chains at all.

Dean holds his phone in his hands and looks at the contact information for a while. The round shape of the _C_ of his name traced over and over by his calloused thumb.

"Good lord, you're gone over him," Ellen says, coming into the kitchen.

Dean smiles at her. Places the phone face down on the table and takes a sip of water.  
"I know he pulled you out of hell and everything but I swear, you two are just gross sometimes," she continues to gripe.  She opens the fridge and pulls out a pie pan. Lays it in front of Dean. "Before your brother gets to it," she adds, a little gruffly. Not unkindly.

There's one piece left.

"Shit," Dean says, brightly, "don't even need a fork."

Ellen swats him upside the head. "Language," she chides, but there's no venom to it.

Dean likes Ellen a lot.

"Jo's coming in town tonight," she says. "You two knuckleheads still gonna be here, or do I just need to change the sheets?"  
"I'm not sure," Dean replies around a mouthful of pie. "Ask Sam."

"How long he been showering?" She asks.

"Not five minutes," Dean answers. He knows, too, what to listen for. They've talked about this, that the rush Sam gets from his inhaler makes him jittery and unsteady, might make him pass out or fall over.

Ellen nods. She pours herself a tall glass of iced tea and sits opposite Dean at the kitchen table.

"How's studying going?" She asks, and Dean flinches a little.

She smiles, grimly.

"That well, eh?" She says.

"I can do my alphabet jus' fine, it's when they start putting the letters in the math that I can't get the hang of it," Dean answers. "And why does it matter what the part of a cell are anyway?" He shakes his head.

If Dean's going to be free- actually _free_ \- he has to pass an exam. An emancipation test. It's supposed to show that he can manage in the real world, that he has skills like reading and addition but the thing is, the keep getting harder and _harder._  


Supposed to show he's earned his freedom somehow.

Ellen takes another sip of tea.

There is a sunlit way about her. Not like Dean, permanently tanned and freckled and bleached and thinned from life in the fields- instead, there's a kind of healthy sunfulness to her. She almost seems to glow. Maybe it's the way of her soul, a way to her kind of love.

She's good to them, all of them, and Dean's glad for that.

"Can't be too hard," she says. "That Gabriel passed them."

Dean grins at her and eats more pie.

 

 

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

Castiel sits at his desk and he signs purchase orders and photocopies files and prints out new copies of every digital file they had. He works and works and works, all day and when the clock says five, Pamela saunters into his office.

Pamela is a slim woman but well shaped. She is beautiful is a sharp kind of way. Like there is a joke written on the air that only she can read. It’s all power, and Castiel knows it. It was how she slid her way into a marriage and took a city’s worth of slaves with her in a divorce. He respects it- it’s hard not to.

"Go home," she says from the doorway of his office.

Castiel looks up. He's highlighting and tagging where people need to sign their new purchase forms- for people bought out of actual servitude. Not hard work but they don't have secretaries yet. It's barely been  six months since the office was bombed. They're still recovering.

"I'm almost done, just a few more-"

"It will be here Monday," Pamela interrupts. "You've been here from nine to nine every day this month. Your boyfriend must miss you. Get out."

"He's visiting family," he says.

"Then go call him. I'm locking this whole building closed for the night in ten minutes, and you can't be inside because that's a fire hazard," she replies. "Sod off. Take a night off."

Castiel sighs and looks up at her. She looks so relaxed here, but Castiel sees the dark circles beneath her eyes and the small way her hands shake.

"You need one, too," he answers.

"No rest for the wicked," she shoots back. "Scram."

She wanders off.

His back aches as he gets up from his desk. He sighs heavily. She's right, though. He's been leaving the apartment at about seven and getting home at ten. Dean's been away at Ellen's for about a week now and he won't be happy that Castiel's hasn't been eating much more than bananas and coffee.

Dean cares about Castiel so much. He cares about Castiel and Sam and Ellen and Gabriel and so many people that they know. He's so gentle and so beautiful. He treats Castiel like he's a treasure and he get so upset when Castiel doesn't take care of himself. Something nurturing is seated deep inside of him and it is one of the things that defines him. That is him, in essence.

He grabs his bag, his phone, and his keys and walks off.

The new building doesn’t have the same security stuff yet- it’s pushed a little farther away from the auction block and the old compound. They have locks and scanners and security guards but no tunnels yet. Castiel’s not driving today though, he rode the train in to work and he’ll ride it back.

He pulls out his phone and dials Dean.

There’s a few solid rings before he finally picks up. “Hello?” He answers.

“Hello, Dean,” Castiel replies. “When do you come home?”  
Dean huffs out a small laugh. “Soon, I think,” he answers. “Ellen’s running out of things for us to fix and Sam’s starting to need to actually be at his office, not just get faxes in town.”

Castiel smiles as he hears his voice. He sounds tired.”What was it today?” He asks. “You remodeled her bathrooms three months ago, what else could there be?”

“Hole in the roof,” Dean answers. “Weren’t nothing.”

“Wasn’t anything,” Castiel corrects, fumbling with his wallet to get money for the train. “Are you still studying?”

Dean sighs, heavily. “Algebra is mean,” he says, and Castiel smiles. “I swear, I’ll get the hang of the Pie-thag-o-ree-an theorum if it kills me, but it might just kill me.”  
“What about reading?” Castiel asks. “Gabriel and I can help you with math when you get back to the city,but how is reading and history going?”

“History’s easy,” Dean answers. “Just stories. And reading is hard but it gets easier every day.” He pauses. “Sam’s helping me through a play, that one where the woman kills her husband because he killed their daughter-”

“Agamemnon?” Castiel asks. “Good lord.”

“It’s interesting,” Dean continues. “The words...it has good imagery.”

Castiel smiles again, moving with the rocking of the train so he doesn’t bump into anyone or fall. “That it does,” he says. “I would have feared it would have been a little...intense.”

Castiel can hear Dean shrug on the other end of the line. “It’s a good story,” he says. “And Sam knows when I need to step away.” There’s a shuffling sound, like he’s sitting down somewhere. “Are you on the train?” he asks.

“Yes,” Castiel answers. “Shouldn’t be too long until I’m at my stop.”  
“I wish you would take the car,” Dean murmurs. “I hate those trains.”  
Castiel watches the city roll away from the windows, square buildings sliding away, streets full of cars drifting. “I know,” he replies.

They remind him of the cattle cars. He told Castiel, a few months back after a particularly bad ride on a summer’s evening. Someone had vomited in the back. It had taken hours to pull Dean back into reality, into the present, and away from that space in his memory.

“Pamela says they should have a secure garage within three blocks of the office in a few months,” he says. “Until then-”

“I know,” Dean interupts. “I know. You have to be safe.”

“Come home soon,” Castiel urges.

“I will,” Dean replies.

This is how they say I love you.

Castiel hangs up and places his phone in his pocket. Gets off the train ten minutes later and walks to his apartment, empty.

He flicks on his lights and his television and pulls out a container of rice from the fridge. He tosses a jot or two of soy sauce over it and sits on the couch and watches whatever’s on- a cooking show. He smiles and thinks of Dean. The cooking channel tends to be the default on the television- politically neutral, easy to watch, and there’s usually nothing on it to upset either of them. Before Dean, Castiel watched the news almost exclusively, but he can only handle so much.

Castiel remembers Jess vividly, all of a sudden. Something she’d said to him, at the beginning of everything- his work there, meeting her, everything.

It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better.

Castiel lets his hand rest over the remote for a moment, debating whether to change to the news or not.

There have been more bombings. Prices for slaves have recently skyrocketed; so has demand. They’re having to focus on education and housing right now much more than buying people out of slavery- they simply don’t have the funds to buy blocks of people out like they did before the bombing and the price explosion.

Far away in Washington, there is pushing and shouting from both sides of spectrum right now.What is usually a silent issue, a dirty and open secret, has exploded into the ugliness it is. There have been diatribes, for and against the fifth most lucrative industry in the country- providing labor for the four most lucrative. There is abolition on the mouths of senators, damning and praising. The most extreme bills are being submitted, ones calling for an immediate abolishment alongside retroactive re-purchase laws that would force freedmen back into the fields.

Something is breaking, but damn if anyone can tell what it actually is.

Castiel’s hand hovers.

He turns off the tv and goes to bed.

He’s so tired, and he has a lot of work to do.

 

 


End file.
